Usage calculations and reporting
Your account's current usage is shown on the Dashboard tab of your account's management console.
Depending on which Cloudinary products you use, you may also see the usage shown in a toolbar at the top of the page, and in your account settings page. The Dashboard shows usage graphs for each metric that counts toward your account's usage.
For example, when using our Programmable Media product, there are graphs available to see your Storage, Bandwidth, and Transformations usage, and it's possible to export the details in CSV format for further analysis or reporting.
To help you understand what actions and activities count towards your usage, How does Cloudinary count my plan's quotas and what does every quota mean? the article contains more information about how usage is calculated, and our Plans and Pricing page shows the details of our current paid plans.
API access to usage information
For our Programmable Media product, there's an Admin API method that returns the current usage information, which you can use to create your own custom reporting, and alerts, or to automate actions for your team or application: https://cloudinary.com/documentation/admin_api#usage
Exceeding the usage limits of your plan
All of our plan limits are 'soft' limits and your account remains active if you exceed your limits, and we do not block requests for assets in your account right away if the usage exceeds 100% of your plan. Because of this, assets used in the website or application will continue to load, and your access to manage assets via the API, Media Library, or widgets will not be affected.
When an account's usage approaches 90% of the plan, we'll start to show notices about the usage in the management console and we'll send notification emails to the admins of your account, and to the 'billing email' you've configured, if applicable.
Because your current usage is based on the last 30 days of activity you may find that if your usage is close to 100%, it will drop naturally based on the of the rise and fall in your usage in the last 30 days.
It's often possible to reduce your usage quickly by using your account's reports to identify original assets being requested and replacing the URLs in your website or application with URLs that use Cloudinary's Image Optimization or Video Optimization features.
Options when usage limits are exceeded
Fixed plans
Most Cloudinary plans have fixed limits, and if you exceed 100% of the limit you'll be asked to either upgrade to a plan sufficient for your current usage, or reduce that usage. For customers on our self-service plans, your account settings page will show other plans that may be suitable for you, and the corresponding costs and usage limits.
If you're not sure which plans may be suitable for your usage or if the recent high usage is not typical for you, please contact our support team with the details and we'll see what other options may be available for you. Cloudinary's monthly self-service plans do not have any long-term commitments so you can switch to a smaller or larger plan periodically as your usage changes, provided that if you're downgrading, your account's current usage is within the quota of the plan you're switching to.
If your usage remains above 100% of your plan's quota, your account may be automatically disabled after further notifications are sent. If your account becomes disabled, updates to your account's assets will be blocked, including the creation of new derived (transformed) assets. Delivery of your existing assets may continue after your account is disabled, but if your account remains disabled, asset delivery will also be blocked after some time.
Pay as you go plans
Some Cloudinary plans, including many of our Enterprise plans, are "Pay as you go" plans.
On those plans, your account's "current" usage will rise and fall based on the last 30 days of activity as normal, and if on your account's billing date the usage is above 100% of the quota, we'll charge you for the additional usage at the overage rate of your plan.
Comments
10 comments
Hi,
What if i dont want to upgrade my free plan when my free plan is exceed?,
Thanks
Hi Jessica,
Our plan limits are soft limits. When getting near your plan limits, an automatic notification email will be sent to you, warning you of exceeding it.
You will then be prompted to either settle your usage or upgrade to a more suitable plan. Ignoring those warnings and notifications can result in a deactivation of your account.
Please contact us at support@cloudinary.com in case you have any further questions.
Thanks,
Yael
Hi Yael, one quick question, what do you mean by "settle your usage"? and how I accomplish that?
Hi Jessica,
You can settle your account by reducing your usage or upgrading the account.
Thanks,
Yael
Hi!
We have exceeded the free plan because of the initial synchronisation. I'm not sure if we'll go over the free quota with "regular" usage, but the leap to the first paid plan is quite a large one.
Is there a "one off" payment option for this kind of initial uploads which would require a lot of credits? our customer probably wouldn't mind paying $99 for the initial sync, but that same amount structurally isn't really worth the added value for their business..
Thanks,
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
Can you please contact us at support@cloudinary.com and mention the cloud name? We'll be able to look into this and better advise.
Thanks,
Yael
Also found myself in a smilar situation in which an number of one-off transformations as took me over free plan (122%) - Currently discussing this with support to hopefully gain some grace period to resolve this issue (as for my test app it really doesnt not make sense to move to $99 per month - of course if i was truly using the service to that level I would happily pay)
Although one thing that does worry me is the fact that hotlink protection / whitelisting is only really available on premium plans so I may need to think harder at a long term solution to stop this happening again in the future.
Hi Brian,
We can add CDN-level access control restrictions such as whitelisting/blacklisting on other plans and not just Premium/Enterprise. If you're on a Free plan but you're having spikes of Bandwidth due to hotlinking then please submit a ticket to us via - https://support.cloudinary.com/hc/en-us/requests/new - and we'll be able to have a look and see what we can do to help prevent it.
Hi Guys,
I didn't know the limits. Ive been developing a site using dev, staging and live sites which have caused the bandwidth to sky rocket over the last few days. I've now removed the video that was causing most of the bandwidth usage. Will my account continue working until the bandwidth levels out again after the peak. It's shot right down now so should be within the limits again soonish.
Regards,
Gareth
Hi Gareth,
The credit allocated for a Free Plan is 25 credits (see https://cloudinary.com/pricing) and once you have already exceeded the allowable usage limit, we will ask you to reduce that usage, or upgrade to a paid plan. If your account is eventually disabled, you will not be able to access the Media Library or use our API or SDK. Also, it would not be possible to upload new images, manage existing images, or create new versions of your images using transformations as well.
If your account has already been disabled please contact us via a ticket (https://support.cloudinary.com/hc/en-us/requests/new) and provide your cloud_name and we will review your account details and process your request.
Hope this helps.
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